K.C. Bateman made an impactful entry into the historical romance genre in 2016 with To Steal a Heart, a Napoleonic Era romantic adventure featuring a former acrobat-turned-informant and a sexy spy, which I loved and rated a DIK. The other books in her Secrets and Spies trilogy were similarly enjoyable, and I’ve been eagerly waiting…
The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence is the story of Simonetta Cattaneo, a young woman who moves to Florence in order to marry the rich and potentially powerful Marco Vespucci, but ends up finding love in the arms of another man. It’s a richly drawn historical novel, filled with art, intrigue, love, and sadness, and…
The book reviews that are often hardest to write – as AAR staffers will agree – are those for books which fall into the middle range, the C grade books which aren’t bad, but which don’t really have anything particularly special to make them stand out from the crowd. If you love or hate something,…
I’ve read books that keep me up at night for a variety of reasons. This one certainly kept me up – by sucking me into a gripping plot and also by scaring me with reminders of the realities of life in the past. This book, about a pair of physicians (he is Italian, she is…
I’ve been a fan of Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily series since Emily’s first appearance in And Only to Deceive. Emily has gone through a lot of changes and solved many mysteries since then. The latest entry finds Lady Emily and her husband Colin in Venice to investigate a recent murder. However, classical scholar Emily is…
Have you ever wondered what people did before the number zero? It has always existed, right? Not so. Changeling is about a world where zero is just starting to exist and to open up whole new worlds for people – and that is a fascinating adventure to be a part of. Luca is known as…
You might need to suspend some logic when it comes to enjoying The Treasures of Venice by Loucinda McGary. But if you do, enjoy it you will. Sam Lewis was supposed to be on her honeymoon, and when her fiancé broke things off at the last minute, she decided to go to Italy anyway. While…
Conceptually, The Rossetti Letter is similar to Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series: Both tell the modern day stories of doctoral candidates in Europe, searching for a mystery lost in the crumbling papers and bound books of the past, and at the same time recounting the historical story about the people they are researching. However, this…
Immortal is rather a hard book to pigeon hole. The title suggests vampires, but it’s not a novel of the paranormal, unless you count the fact that the protagonist ages abnormally slowly, over the course of centuries instead of years. If pressed I would say this is historical fiction because so much of the book…
One of the greatest difficulties of translating real history directly into fiction is that the ending has already been written. Happy ever after or tragedy, the author must live with the facts. <!– var browName = navigator.appName; var SiteID = 1; var ZoneID = 4; var browDateTime = (new Date()).getTime(); if (browName=='Netscape') { document.write('‘); document.write(”);…
End of content
End of content